The Last Nude

Author: Ellis Avery
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101554185
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
“As erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.

The Teahouse Fire

Author: Ellis Avery
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594482731
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
“Like attending seasons of elegant tea parties—each one resplendent with character and drama. Delicious.”—Maxine Hong Kingston The story of two women whose lives intersect in late-nineteenth-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places and times in all of history—Japan as it opens its doors to the West. It was a period when wearing a different color kimono could make a political statement, when women stopped blackening their teeth to profess an allegiance to Western ideas, and when Japan’s most mysterious rite—the tea ceremony—became not just a sacramental meal, but a ritual battlefield. We see it all through the eyes of Aurelia, an American orphan adopted by the Shin family, proprietors of a tea ceremony school, after their daughter, Yukako, finds her hiding on their grounds. Aurelia becomes Yukako’s closest companion, and they, the Shin family, and all of Japan face a time of great challenges and uncertainty. Told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability.

The Last of the Live Nude Girls

Author: Sheila McClear
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593764626
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
A “eye-opening, gritty, and compelling” memoir by one of New York City’s last Times Square peep show girls (The Paris Review Online). In 2006, Gotham City Video was among the last of its kind where, breathing in a cocktail of Pine-Sol and Windex, a man paid $40 to watch a girl strip naked behind glass. These fantasy lands, left over from the days when 42nd Street was the center of vice, eventually disappeared from the rapidly gentrifying city, their stories lost forever. Not those of tenderloin grinder, Sheila McCelar. Pulling back the curtain on the little-documented world of the peeps, her “ribald . . . memorable and highly relevant” (The Daily Beast) reflection is “both a eulogy and a paean to the freaks and misfits who have long given their souls to the city” (Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case). A late bloomer from small-town Michigan, Sheila arrived in New York as a struggling actress and soon found herself adrift. Borderline homeless, and crashing with friends, she finally got steady work that paid the rent—as a stripper along the triple-x stretch of Eighth Avenue. When Times Square seeped into her blood, she ended up staying much longer than she imagined. The story she tells is not just of her own coming-of-age, it’s a “sharp, sweetly personal . . . fascinating and honest” narrative of modern life on the fringes of society in New York City (Mark Jacobson, author of Pale Horse Rider).

Hold Still

Author: Sally Mann
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031624774X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Book Description
This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

Blue Nude

Author: Elizabeth Rosner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439181314
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Once a prominent painter, Danzig now shares his wisdom and technique with students at San Francisco’s Art Institute—yet his own canvases remain empty. When he meets Israeli-born Merav, the beautiful new model for his class, he senses she may reignite his artistic passion. Merav moved to California to escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, yet she cannot outrun her fears about the past. As the characters challenge one another, Rosner lyrically uncovers their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives to propel them toward reconciliation, redemption, and ultimately revival.

Degas and the Nude

Author: George T. M. Shackelford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500093627
Category : Nude in art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The nude figure was critical to the art of Edgar Degas throughout his life, and yet his expansive body of work on this subject has been overshadowed by his celebrated portraits and dancers. Degas and the Nude is the first book in a generation to explore the artist's treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades, when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading critics, the book aims to provide a new interpretation of Degas's evolving conception of the nude and to situate it in the subject's broader context among his peers in 19th-century France. Among the scores of reproductions is one of the most important of Degas's early paintings, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which exerted a lifelong influence on the artist's treatment of the female nude and includes poses poses repeated throughout his career. Also included are monotypes of the late 1870s, which illustrate Degas's most explicitly sexual depictions of women in Parisian brothels, and pictures portraying the daily life of women wherever they resided. Together these iterations range over more than a half-century of virtuoso achievement and manifest a groundbreaking look at the evolution of this master artist.

The Renaissance Nude

Author: Thomas Kren
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 160606584X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

Art of the Nude

Author: Deirdre Robinson
Publisher: Smithmark Publishers
ISBN: 9780831741488
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description

A Thief in the Nude

Author: Olivia Waite
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997333244
Category : Man-woman relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
John Rushmore has all but given up on his talents as a painter, unable to recapture the passion of earlier days. He is pleased to have his boredom lightened by the appearance of a redheaded thief, and even more delighted to be introduced to her the following night in an elegant Society ballroom. Miss Hecuba Jones is in pursuit of the paintings that make up her rightful inheritance. She is prickly and suspicious and absolutely irresistible. She's also an inspiration. Before long, John finds himself working deep into the night to try to capture the feverish, erotic visions she provokes.

Nude Awakening

Author: Penny Clarke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
Rylie swears she's not a prude.How was I to know the art course my best friend signed me up for meant I'd be sketching a nude model? I should have checked the fine print. Then I never would have―quite literally―bumped into Levi Hart moments before he dropped trou in class.He can turn up the charm all he wants―I'm not sleeping with the guy that starred in a sex tape circulating campus last year (and no, I didn't watch it. Much). Even if the more he takes his clothes off, the more it turns me on, it's not happening.Levi is no stranger to nudity.Yes, I was in that video. But I'm trying to put that behind me, which is why I'm doing this art class modeling gig. Now, I just need to convince Rylie Stone to overlook my past mistakes...and maybe not run away every time I get naked.Rylie can deny it all she wants, but I've seen how she stares at my body. She wants me. And I want her. So I'm pulling out all the stops (and taking off all my shirts) until she realizes just how much fun can be had when you go after what you want.---NUDE AWAKENING is Book One in the MAIN DESIRE series. It is a full-length standalone new adult college romance featuring twerking leopards, steamy shenanigans with a shirtless football player, and lots of cat-astrophically bad puns about felines.